The facts of global poverty are startling, and the degree of inequality is increasing. Starting in the 1970s, with important works by scholars such as Peter Singer (“Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 [no. 3, 1972]: 229–43) and Charles Beitz (Political Theory and International Relations, 1979), political theorists have devoted increasing attention to whether these facts create obligations of distributive justice and, if so, on what grounds. In the last decade, the debate has become arguably the main growth area in analytic political philosophy. The main battle line is between cosmopolitans, who argue that the norm of equal moral worth requires that principles of justice have global scope, and statists, who think that political boundaries circumscribe redistributive duties.

András Miklós provides a careful survey of the literature, focusing special attention on the role of institutions. He defends a cosmopolitan position with regard to the scope of justice, but moderates it with an original argument to the extent that principles of justice may be indeterminate without political institutions to specify the value of distributive shares and governing strategic interaction between individuals (pp. 139–63, especially 145–50).

The first five chapters analyze the major positions in the debate. Miklós starts with nationalist and communitarian theories, such as those of Michael Walzer (Spheres of Justice, 1983) and David Miller (On Nationality, 1995). He argues that such positions fail to demonstrate the existence of a domestic consensus that does not exist at the global level (pp. 17–19), or to offer convincing instrumental or intrinsic reasons for using the value of national self-determination to prioritize conationals (pp. 21–33). Next, he rejects “political conceptions of justice” (p. 37), most notably that of Thomas Nagel (“The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 33 [no. 3, 2005]: 113–47). Miklós argues that such conceptions cannot provide grounds for criticizing undemocratic states (pp. 43–44). He goes on to claim that these conceptions offer an inadequate account of political obligation, especially with regard to foreigners (pp. 45–48).

Having made similar criticisms of John Rawls’s attempts (The Law of Peoples, 1999) to deny the global applicability of his theory of justice, Miklós defends the arguments of Beitz and Thomas Pogge (World Poverty and Human Rights, 2002) in favor of a global original position, on the grounds that global cooperation approximates a “basic structure” (p. 115). Miklós also surveys “nonrelational” forms of cosmopolitanism, including arguments for a resource redistribution principle and the “luck egalitarianism” of Simon Caney (Justice Beyond Borders, 2005) and Darrel Moellendorf (Cosmopolitan Justice, 2002). The coverage is thorough, although there is a heavy emphasis on analytic work, with no mention of Seyla Benhabib (The Rights of Others, 2004), Kimberly Hutchings (Global Ethics, 2010), or even Kwame Appiah (Cosmopolitanism, 2007).

Miklós’s claim to originality is his focus on institutions, which he takes to “involve roles together with rights and duties attached to them” and to exist “when a number of people regularly and knowingly follow [their] rules” (p. 5). This claim is most clear in the final chapters of the book, in which the focus on institutions leads him to recast the intracosmopolitan debate between “relational” and “nonrelational” cosmopolitanism. Previous characterizations of this division take the former to emphasize that people all over the world are united in certain relationships, with the latter focusing instead on human dignity or individuality (e.g., Chris Armstrong, Global Distributive Justice, 2012, pp. 12–13). Miklós notes that all humans stand in some sort of relationship and that what distinguishes a relational view is its emphasis on “specific prior practice-mediated relations” (p. 118); in other words, on institutions.

In the final chapter, Miklós presents his major thesis, which is that even if institutions do not give rise to principles of justice, they still affect their scope of application (p. 141). The literature has tended to see institutions either as playing a foundational role in determining principles of justice or as “effective instruments” (p. 142) for achieving justice. Miklós counters that institutions play a constitutive role in debates about justice by defining just distributions and determining the content of requirements of justice. His first point is that principles of justice may not tell us exactly how to distribute goods but, rather, “circumscribe a range of permissible values” (p. 147). For principles of justice to apply, we must agree on one arrangement, and we cannot do that without authoritative institutional practices. Secondly, institutions provide us with assurance about the behavior of others and authoritatively settle debates about distributive justice, which is necessary if we are to know how to act in cases of disagreement (p. 150). Economic as well as political institutions are necessary, given that bundles of goods cannot be compared without some sort of market (pp. 144–45). However, as the role of institutions is to determine the content of principles of justice rather than to determine the principles themselves, “our duty of justice should guide institutional reform at the global level so that just global institutions can be created” (p. 156).

This argument has the potential to make a significant contribution to a debate in which principles of justice continue to tend to be advanced at a high level of abstraction. Even such concrete proposals as a Tobin Tax and a global resource dividend need some way to weight bundles of redistributed resources. Miklós’s point that authoritative institutions are necessary for ensuring an impartial judgment about that weighting highlights the difficulties of this task. However, the author leaves some important questions open.

First, it is unclear whether his argument would necessitate a world state. If, as he notes, a task of institutions is to single out a particular set of distributive arrangements from a range of possible just ones on “what are essentially arbitrary grounds” (p. 149), then it might well be that only in a world state would we have a determinate set of arrangements capable of weighting resource bundles across the globe. Yet, although Miklós himself is critical of this argument (p. 82), even most cosmopolitans have thought that a world state would result either in tyranny or in perpetual civil war. Second, assuming that his suggestion that a “multilayered global institutional scheme” of “vertically dispersed” authority (p. 84) could effectively determine the content of principles of justice, it would be worth considering whether institutions might play a constitutive role in global distributive justice as object of principles of justice. One of the gravest forms of global inequality is access to effective institutions. Institutional reform is an important topic that Miklós leaves somewhat undertheorized. Finally, the gap between the author and some of those he criticizes may be smaller than he acknowledges. Nagel, for example, does not rule out institutional reform designed to promote global justice, but merely cautions that “political power is rarely created as a result of demands for legitimacy” (“The Problem of Global Justice,” p. 145), and he concludes that “the path from anarchy to justice must go through injustice” (ibid., p. 147).

In drawing our attention to the need for institutions to determine the content of principles of justice, Miklós has done the literature a great service. But we must remain aware of the dangers, as well as the promise, of global distributive institutions.